Tag Archives: Army

Nice to see Keith Olbermann reads Global Dashboard. In January, shortly before MSNBC fired him, Olbermann did a story on the US Army’s ambitious resilience training programme, which I reported on back in October 2009. Olbermann reports that some atheist soldiers are objecting to the ‘spiritual fitness’ aspect of the programme, which rates to what extent soldiers feel ‘connected to humanity’ and guided by ‘a sense of meaning’ etc. Olbermann then quotes my interview with the programme’s director, Rhonda Cornum, where she says ‘every time you say the S-P-I-R word you’re going to get sued’. If you look really carefully under the photo of Cornum, you can see ‘Source: globaldashboard.org’.

To be fair to Cornum and the programme’s designer, Martin Seligman of Penn University, I would not say the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme is ‘religious’, or ‘Christian’. Martin Seligman is Jewish, for one thing. But he does believe, and has evidence to show, that part of being a resilient person is having a sense of meaning in one’s life. That’s not the same as religion. I would have thought atheists could see that…

But I thought that the politics of wellbeing would get into these problems. As soon as a liberal government backs one version of the Good Life, it’s going to be accused of violating the freedom of conscience and religious belief. That’s the challenge facing pluralist, multicultural societies – how to create a sense of unity, cohesion and common values in our society (including in our armies) without being accused of forcing your beliefs onto other people. Still, this seems a pretty unbalanced news story to me.

In a letter to Robert Gates, cleverly disguised as an op-ed in The Times, soldier-author Allan Mallinson asks a very simple question: “Why, for example, are we so overstretched keeping 8,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan out of an Army of 100,000?”

It is a very good question, the answer to which lies in the MoD’s “concurrency assumptions”, the assumptions military planners use to foresee the required structure, size and capability of the armed forces. In Delivering Security in a Changing World Future Capabilities, the MoD estimated that Britain could mount “as a norm, and without creating overstretch”:

an enduring Medium Scale operation; simultaneously with

an enduring Small Scale operation; and

a one-off Small Scale intervention operation

It went on to say that the government reforms would allow a reconfiguration of the armed forces so they could rapidly carry out:

the enduring Medium Scale operation; and

an enduring Small Scale operation; simultaneously with

a limited duration Medium Scale intervention operation.

And given time to prepare, British armed forces should be capable of undertaking:

a demanding one-off Large Scale operation; while still maintaining a commitment to

a simple Small Scale peace support operation.

The first problem with all these assumptions is that they were based on a notion of a time-limited engagement i.e. getting the troops in and then out quickly. But it has not turned out this way. Both Operation Telic (Iraq) and Operation Herrick (Afghanistan) turned into enduring medium-size operations (and latterly one medium, and one small), which the armed forces struggled to sustain.

This begs the question: if the MoD cannot manage two enduring medium-size operations can it handle an enduring Medium Scale operation, an enduring Small Scale operation and a limited duration Medium Scale intervention operation all the same time, as the White Paper suggested? If the answer is negative, Britain either needs to drastically adjust its ambitions downwards or the armed forces need to grow dramatically.

Global Dashboard explores global risks and international affairs, bringing together authors who work on foreign policy in think tanks, government, academia, and the media. It was set up in 2007 and is edited from the UK by Alex Evans and David Steven. Read more here

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